


"Cover me over dead before I ever hear your cry"

by Anonymous



Category: Greek and Roman Mythology, The Iliad - Homer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, F/M, M/M, Multi, Prisoner of War, Sexual Slavery, Spoils of War, Survivor Guilt, Values Dissonance, sexual extortion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-10-09 22:44:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17413931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Hector survives a duel and lives to see his city burn. Achilles dodges an arrow and lives to break down Hector’s door.





	1. "This is all a prisoner asks: Let us live"

**Author's Note:**

> The "canon" I’m writing off here is essentially pick-and-mix Processed Myth Product, definitely inconsistent to the Iliad (however much it cribs from it) and most likely inaccurate to the Bronze Age Mediterranean. The premise of this story lends itself to a particularly unflattering version of Achilles who, among other things, rapes and murders a teenage boy. 
> 
> Chapters forthcoming whenever my id punches my superego.
> 
> _And in Argos you will work the loom for another woman,_  
>  _and carry water from the spring of Messeïs or Hypereia_  
>  _time and again under compulsion, and necessity will lie harsh upon you._  
>  _And one day someone seeing you shedding tears may say:_  
>  _‘This is the wife of Hector, who used to be best of the horse-breaking Trojans_  
>  _in waging battle, at that time when men fought round Ilion.’_  
>  _So one day someone may speak; and for you the pain will be new again,_  
>  _bereft of such a husband to ward off the day of slavery._  
>  _But may the heaped earth cover me over dead_  
>  _before I ever hear your cry as you are dragged away._  
>  – The _Iliad_ , book VI (translated by Caroline Alexander)

He didn’t die, that day before the walls of Troy, but for a long time it seemed to make no difference. 

Or if it made a difference, it was for the worse – so Hector supposed, countless times, in the darkest part of the night. If Achilles had finished him it would have been a clean cut of the Fates’ thread, not this frayed and unraveling thing, trailing in the blood and dust. A round of mourning, the flames of a pyre, over and done with. Andromache disagreed, when he ventured to confide in her. Of course Andromache would disagree. Of course the rest of his family would never suggest it, though their anxious pity said enough. The other women of Troy, though, the mothers and sisters, the daughters and widows... he heard the platitudes that were allowed through but could only imagine what they really thought of him – broken, crippled, lacking the decency either to die and atone for his failures or to live wholly, offer the enemy’s body in his place, and be of use to his people. 

If he was of any use at all, it was as a nursemaid. When he could begin to remember being awake he remembered the weight of his son beside him, the tiny fingers trying to wrap themselves around his. Even when he could do little more than twitch and groan, Astyanax kept himself amused – chattering, clambering, dancing his toys over the expanse of blankets. Time passed and Hector could sit up, join in his games, help him place his toys. With one hand at first, then two, though the grip of his right hand remained so weak that anyone stronger than a child could break it. 

***

While he lay bedridden, Achilles murdered Troilus. 

Troilus was the youngest son of King Priam left in Troy. He was also the youngest of Hector’s full-blooded brothers, born to both the king and queen, though rumor had it as he grew into uncanny beauty that he was born only to the queen, that his true father was Apollo. They found him in Apollo’s old temple outside the walls, sprawled over the altar. What exactly had happened there none but Apollo and Achilles could have said. But they knew it was Achilles because Polyxena, their youngest sister, had escaped to tell them. She’d looked over her shoulder as she clung to the neck of her mare and seen him run fast enough to outpace Troilus’s horse, seen him tear Troilus from its back and begin to drag him away. 

Hector finally let them put him on a litter so they could carry him out of his house, across the courtyard, up the steps into the main body of the palace. Inside the strangely empty entrance hall, he heard his father railing at his brothers a room away. The king’s rage, all the more frightening for its rarity, froze him and Andromache and the litter-bearers in their places. _– worth the useless lot of you – and now who’s left? Well, I expect we’re still well-equipped for heroes to come forth and dance, or tell lies, or steal sheep_ – 

“He doesn’t mean it,” Andromache whispered. “He doesn’t mean you.” 

“She’s right,” Polyxena whispered. Her eyes were dry now. “He was like this after you... after... when they thought you would die. He drove out all the mourners, then, too. Troilus was the only one who could calm him.” 

Hector didn’t tell them that if his father didn’t mean him, didn’t include him, he _should_. 

Troilus’s neck was draped in silk, held in place by cushions to keep it from an unnatural loll. He was washed and perfumed, laid out in a fresh white tunic that covered any remaining trace of desecration. Their brother Polites and their cousin Aeneas had cleaned up as much as they could before turning him over to the women. 

But there was no forgetting what Polites and Aeneas had seen when they burst into the temple. Even what they didn’t say spoke as loud as what they said. 

Hector sat deposited in a chair by the bier, Andromache at his side, Troilus’s cold hand pressed between his own (his hands had always been warm, sun-warm), and thought: useless. Useless. _Useless_. 

***

After a while, perhaps after some promising reports, his father brought him a walking staff of fine wood, capped top and bottom with bronze, every possible splinter polished smooth. For another while it stood propped against the frame of the bed in silent accusation. Then he took it beneath his left arm, swung his legs across and his feet onto the floor, and learned over again how to walk while Astyanax, who was done with walking by now, progressed to running. Together they stumbled and fell, and at least once they went down in a tangle when Astyanax tried to run between his legs. Astyanax burst into tears now and again, from pain or frustration, and sometimes he thought he would’ve cried himself if he hadn’t had Astyanax to comfort and amuse. If Astyanax missed being lifted and swung up over his father’s head, he gave no sign. 

By now Astyanax no longer needed his nurse to guide him by the hand, only to tend him when he fell, to shoo him from the cooking fire. Hector needed Andromache – her hand, her arm, her shoulders – far more often than he’d like. At first he’d tried to refuse, but in her domain she stood fast. A lot of good it would do, she pointed out quite rightly, if he were to break himself still worse in a tumble to hard floor because he was too proud to take help. And after she had already helped him with a hundred little indignities, ones he had never before considered would naturally be faced by a man with three limbs that refused to work as they should. 

Sometimes Astyanax would rush through one door and another to play in the courtyard. He wouldn’t follow, even when he ought to have the strength, even with Andromache at his elbow, even with Astyanax calling – _Papa, Papa._ The closest he came to it was seating himself in the entrance hall, still clutching the staff in his good hand, and closing his eyes in the sunlight. But he did his best not to drowse there, to drift away, because then the chances were higher he would dream of the last time he could run, the last time he had run, the heat on the back of his neck, the sweat in his eyes. And then he’d wake when he struck the thick carpet to which he’d flung himself, trying to escape. 

Only a memory of pain, and a memory of a snarl – _try and run now._

***

He next staggered out from his house when word arrived that Paris was wounded, that Paris was poisoned, that Paris was dying. 

Saving what was left of his life was the work of many, so it was explained to him after the fact. Deiphobus, bolting down from the wall the moment he saw his double appear and start calling out lies. Polydamas, who followed and kept the same frantic pace for no reason he could explain afterward. The twins Cassandra and Helenus, who arranged to open the gate enough so it was ready for them to pass through. Paris, who rallied the archers on the battlements. 

Achilles had ripped off the helmet that had once been his, wrenched the silver-banded greaves from Hector’s shattered legs. He stepped away from Hector’s prostrate body, toward his chariot, carrying them under his arms. When he had gone far enough a rain of arrows stopped him from turning back to Hector and discouraged the other Achaeans who were coming near. Those arrows purchased the time for Deiphobus, Polydamas, and Helenus to reach him, for him to be carried through the gate and behind the wall. 

He heard this from each of his brothers, of course. From Polydamas, who was almost a brother – the stars joined them where blood didn’t – and who never reproached him over spitting on his good counsel or ignoring his warnings of disaster, only rejoicing that the disaster was not utterly complete. Even from Cassandra, who told it with large startled eyes. When an enraged Apollo touched her mind and scrambled her wits, he hadn’t stopped her from speaking clearly of the past. And when she told this story she said nothing of the future. When Deiphobus told it, there was still the bewilderment of looking down and seeing himself – and Hector remembered weeping and gabbling like a drunk, saying over again much the same things he’d said to the false Deiphobus – because he’d come for him after all, in the end he’d come. When Paris told it, he told it with hopeful eyes – _didn’t I help? Did I get it right this time?_

He could remember the questions in Paris’s eyes but he couldn’t remember if he’d answered them. 

There was a time he would have walked the steps to Paris’s house in moments, and had to slow himself not to leave Andromache behind. As it was, they only arrived after his mother and sisters, at the same time as his father – who for all he knew might have slowed his pace for them to cross the threshold together. He would’ve been absolute last if his brothers hadn’t been at the walls or beyond, and needed to withdraw themselves from duties he no longer had. They crowded in a half-circle around the bed. They still made a crowd, but not nearly so large a crowd as they had made at Paris’s wedding feast. 

Paris. Paris was the baby that Mother and Father for once were unhappy to see born, the baby who was born at noon and gone before nightfall. Paris was the young shepherd like a mirror set in the crowd come for the festival; when the royal family whispered among themselves – _Do you see that? See him? Doesn’t he look just like –?_ – they understood one another immediately. Paris was the brother long lost, brought back to them by the grace of Aphrodite after so much time wasted – and why they had lost him, and wasted all that time, no one now could say (though Hector remembered his strange, solitary older brother, the seer Aesacus, Father’s first son by his first wife, and the rift that opened between him and Mother after the baby disappeared). Paris was charming, feckless, easily put to fright. Paris was and was and was. 

Paris writhed on the bed because he had no more strength to thrash, and groaned in his throat because he had no more voice to scream. 

It was hydra’s blood, the poison that not even Heracles could withstand. No antidote hastily compounded or retrieved from the vaults did anything against its progress – anything, even, for the pain. When Paris could speak he said there was only one thing that would do it – one person, the nymph Oenone. He’d loved her before Helen, and left her behind on Mount Ida with his shepherd’s life. 

They’d sent Helen to plead their case with her. Perhaps they shouldn’t have. Helen said as much, when she returned. She was even paler, white-faced and white-armed both, as pallid as when she’d crept in to visit him holding jars of salves and poultices before her as a shield. She would meet no one’s eyes, not even his. Nor was he sure that he wanted their eyes to meet, though he told himself again and again that wishing someone was never born wasn’t the same as wishing them dead (a nasty little whisper: it wasn’t the same because if Paris was never born, then all the troubles he caused in his short life would never have come to pass. Mere death left the troubles, taken form long ago, to fester and rot). 

***

Later Hector would regret, among a hundred other regrets, that he didn’t speak more strongly in favor of returning Helen now that she had only the one husband again – that he didn’t give more backing to Antenor and Polydamas when they suggested it. Send her back, and for good measure send all the treasures of Sparta that Paris no longer had use for. Maybe, even after a decade, that would have saved what was left of them. Sent the ships across the sea, packed with weary men, and swept the beaches clean. What brief words he did offer in council were washed away with those of Antenor and Polydamas in the current. _After so long, what might they think to do to her? No, no, we can’t leave her to the Achaeans’ tender mercies. She has been so long under our roof, let her remain there, let her stay safe._ Later he would note another regret – that as they’d argued so over Helen, Helen wasn’t there. Maybe, knowing what he knew now, if anyone had thought to ask her what she wished... She accepted the decision they presented to her, but that was what she had always done. 

And meanwhile he sat with his head bowed and his hands folded, left over right, and wished that Paris had never been found. That he’d stayed on Mount Ida with his nymph (Oenone, too, was dead by then, because she wouldn’t save his life but she would add her death to his) and faced no greater menace than cattle-thieves and bandits. 

No wedding feast this time. Helen was thrust into the arms of another son of Priam with barely more ceremony than – awful thought – a slave being parceled off. Deiphobus, as the eldest still unmarried, though Paris himself had been nowhere near eldest. 

Helenus stormed out – out of the palace, out of the city – while Cassandra tore at her hair, whimpering. “A fit of temper,” Deiphobus reassured her, one hand patting her shoulder while the other stayed caught with Helen’s. “He’ll be back soon enough.” He wasn’t back soon enough. 

***

Astyanax, at a loss for words, held up one of his carved toys for illustration. 

“A horse?” asked Hector, who knew already what it must be. 

Astyanax nodded vigorously. “Horse,” he repeated. He opened his arms above his head. “Big.” 

He didn’t go to see it, Athena’s magnificent wooden horse they’d knocked down a section of wall to bring in. That was another regret, another _what if._ Maybe he would have seen it, and known it, and done better than Cassandra or Laocoon. And maybe Athena would have simply struck him dead, like she throttled and broke Laocoon and Laocoon’s two boys. 

Tomorrow, he told Andromache, told his mother and father, and meant it. It wasn’t going to go anywhere. 

***

Once he could move again he’d maintained the routine of laying out his gear – on the bedspread if need be – and polishing the armor, sharpening the sword. To do otherwise would be to admit the unthinkable. So there was no fault in the armor he donned, or the light shield he strapped to his right arm, or the sword he held with his left hand. The fault was all in him. 

Andromache helped him dress when she saw he would not be dissuaded. She had done so before, though far fewer times than she had unfastened catches and lifted pieces clear. She knelt behind him on the bed, as he sat on its edge. Near the door two of their servants – Callistus and Melitta, brother and sister – stood with andirons from the hearth in their trembling hands. In a far corner of the room, the nurse – Syntyche – knelt with Astyanax whimpering in her arms. Around her huddled the rest of the household who hadn’t taken their chances outside, in the smoke and screams. In the corner opposite Polyxena stood with a dagger in her grip. 

“Cassandra was right,” she’d said between coughs. “The horse. They climbed out of the horse. And more at the gates, more through the wall. Cassandra... we ran. But I lost her hand, I couldn’t find her.” 

Polyxena had meant only to catch her breath, to warn them, to keep running up to the palace to join their mother and father. But when she saw they would not go with her, she refused to go either, and she asked if he would lend her the dagger. He didn’t know who she meant to use it on. 

She wasn’t the last visitor. Men – Trojan men – had come into the house, calling for him. But by then they – or rather, the servants – had piled a makeshift barricade of furniture before the bedchamber door, shut and barred it. So the men, understanding what he meant to do, had commended him to Athena and left. But he thought, listening to the sounds outside, that they hadn’t gone far. 

Maybe no one would come in. Maybe the Achaeans would set the roof alight and let it collapse on their heads. But surely they would be after plunder. This doorway was fairly narrow, and would stem the advance to one man at a time. One man he might be able to handle. If Athena had deserted them, as he had long suspected, maybe Ares would lend him the strength to give an intruder his just reward before the end. Better that than to be cut down as he limped across the courtyard in search of the rest of his family. 

Cool reason told him this, and he obeyed it. But half of him screamed to go to them anyway, even if he had to crawl across the stones, in hope of those last few moments. 

He took up position supported by the back of a chair, ushering back the siblings, and only then realized he wasn’t wearing shoes. He had to make a ridiculous sight with bare feet beneath his greaves. Perhaps he could kill another one while they laughed at him. But there was no time left to lace up a pair. The clash of weapons outside had faded, leaving only men’s voices and the pile on the other side of the door coming apart, shoved and smashed – the loom, the chests, the table. 

The door itself broke and fell. He saw the bare face of Achilles on the other side. He thought: _So Death has been battering at the Skaian Gate. So Fate has roamed howling outside the walls. And they’ve found their way in to end this properly._

Though truth be told, his very first thought was: _So I won’t take even one of them with me._

Achilles did laugh, after the first frozen moment. He laughed as he met the swing of Hector’s sword with a clang, knocked it askew and wrenched it from his grip, knocked the shield aside with another contemptuous motion that left his arm numb to the shoulder, shoved him to the floor, ripped the helmet from his head and replaced it with a grip like eagle’s talons in his hair. A hideous clatter of metal – the sword, the helmet, followed by the shield as his hand and then his arm slid free of the straps. The sound of wood joined it when Achilles kicked the chair aside, upending it. Behind him, someone stifled a scream. And one last brief clatter, as coda – a falling andiron, he thought. Achilles pulled his head back, baring his throat, forcing his gaze upward. 

Achilles said, “You lived.” 

It occurred to Hector then that he might not have known that. He might have thought that Polydamas and his brothers only risked themselves to recover his corpse, as all heard what Achilles meant to do with it. And Hector had never returned to the battlefield, or even appeared on the battlements. “Yes,” he said. His legs splayed strangely beneath him. His hands, emptied, lay open against the floor. “I lived.” 

Movement and sound, past the doorway. Achilles brought companions. 

The blade gleamed as it slowly rose, in preparation to descend again – this time swift. Or so he hoped, with what hope was left, not-quite kneeling and staring upward. A word trembled on his tongue; he kept his mouth shut on it. Better to die a dumb beast or an abject man? 

Astyanax had been born within the walls of Troy and lived his life there. The closest he had been to a thing like this was the view from the walls, and up close he saw only the hollow motions, the neat and painted imitations. When he called out from the far corner his voice was puzzled but not afraid. “Papa. Papa?” 

That drew the word from him. “Please.” It came out on a breath. He barely felt it on his lips. The shape of it was the pinfeather of a tiny bird, drifting down and soon lost. 

Still, Achilles heard. “This again?” He continued to raise his sword. He raised the corners of his mouth, too, and bared his teeth, like those wild beasts he’d been warned never meant well when they grinned. “Rest assured, you’ll have the same honors as the rest.” 

Hector shook his head. All those lessons in elocution and it was as though his tongue had been cut out while he lay in the dust before the Skaian Gate. “Not for the dead. For the living,” he managed, eventually, and stopped, transfixed by an abrupt terror that Achilles would laugh in his upturned face again and butcher them all out of spite. 

Achilles’ eyes moved; he was looking further away. He wasn’t laughing, not yet. As though he took inventory he said, at last, “Your woman, your boy, your sister, isn’t it?” For he had seen Polyxena before. Polyxena had seen him. There came the laugh, now – why now? He didn’t know. Achilles looked in another direction and said, shaping something like a human smile, “Put that down, girl.” And the something clanked on the floor, once. The sound was wrong for Polyxena’s dagger. Melitta’s andiron, then. 

In the next long moments the hand buried in Hector’s hair relaxed and came loose. He kept his neck craned back, waiting to meet his eyes again. Behind him he heard gasps, hisses of breath, the occasional sob, but no words. Behind Achilles he could hear the other Achaeans speaking but their words slurred together in his ears, indistinct. Achilles was still smiling. Did that bode well or ill? 

Those moments stretched and spun out long enough that when Achilles finally said “Supposing,” Hector jerked as though he’d been struck. “Supposing I give up any prettier pieces for those three. Supposing I don’t sell your woman to a whorehouse or dump your brat on a mountaintop. Supposing I don’t even take them to _my_ bed, unless they should put themselves there.” He looked down at Hector again. Hector was, insanely, reminded of nothing so much as a merchant smug in the knowledge that his proposal, however flagrantly unbalanced, must be accepted. “What will you give for that?” 

Well, he had dealt with merchants before, though always from a higher vantage than this. This was, he understood, the most that would be offered. _Those three_ , who had the luck – whatever sort of luck it was – to be standing behind him. But it _was_ being offered, and it was better than it could have been. An offer of life – life in slavery, life brought low, but a life that uncountable people could and had endured. _Those three –_ Andromache, Astyanax, Polyxena. One of the fears that had flitted past his mind’s eye was that he would be forced to _choose_. 

If he could secure this... then whether he crossed to the underworld or wandered, a maimed wraith, there would be that much less bitterness in his mouth. 

What _could_ he give for it? What could he give that Achilles could not simply take? 

He lifted his hands from the floor with care, palms up, before leaning forward and looping his arms around Achilles’ knees. He met Achilles’ gaze and opened himself beneath it – adjusting his posture, his legs, the angle of his neck. Fear and submission to slake any remaining thirst for his pain. Simple enough. But a frame of dignity beneath to prove that he was still something of a man, something worth bargaining with, something worth keeping oaths to. “What do you require of me?” 

“Your brother begged like this.” 

Hector knelt, waited for him to follow this thought with another, and wondered which brother he spoke of. 

“No, your half-brother. He insisted on telling me so. It was very important to him that I know he didn’t fall out of your lady mother’s cunt. I have to say he didn’t whine nearly as much the first time I caught him –” 

“Lycaon.” He’d been thinking, with dread, of Troilus. 

“I suppose that was his name,” said Achilles after a moment – a calculated moment, he knew, a calculated carelessness, a calculated provocation. He didn’t rise to it. 

Lycaon was one of his youngest brothers, though not as young as Troilus, a son of Priam but not of Hecuba; his mother was a princess of the Leleges. He was one of those who didn’t come back, the day the Scamander ran red. That was after, one night more than a year before, he hadn’t come back from the orchards. They’d searched among the trees and found only his bronze hatchet fallen in the churned earth. After weeks and months word trickled in from Imbros and Arisbe – Achilles had taken him and sold him across the sea, but an ally saw him in chains on Lemnos and bought him out. Then he arrived on an inland road, swathed in a rough cloak, his sandals coming apart, his eyes hollow. He had only been home for twelve days. 

“Take it off.” 

He blinked. 

“That armor is mine. Take it off.” 

Without yet looking away, Hector fumbled at a catch on the shoulder of the breastplate. It _had_ been his. “Do you swear –” 

Achilles’ eyes narrowed. “I swear nothing.” 

_As well for men to make a pact with lions, or wolves to treat with sheep_ – 

He lowered his eyes and undid the catch anyway, then moved on to its twin on the opposite shoulder. He proceeded with the terms of the bargain, even if there was no bargain at all. 

He got out of the breastplate eventually, all the while remembering with what strange and sudden ease it had come off _that_ time, hanging from the body of Patroclus. But then, so it was said, a god’s fingers had been at work. He set it aside and drew his legs from beneath him, one at a time, to slide off the greaves. Those had been made for him, were always his, but there was no purpose in arguing the point. That was simpler though his fingers, ungodlike, kept trembling. And with that he was left in nothing but the tunic he had worn to bed. He folded his legs beneath him again. Then he arranged his expression, not so much to deceive as to push the fear to the forefront and tamp down the hope, before he raised his eyes – 

– and felt the arrangements ripped away from his face, leaving only blank stupefaction at what he saw there. 

“What?” said Achilles after an instant, or an hour. He was tucking the raised hem of his tunic out of the way, into his sword-belt. “Do you need to be told how it works?” 

Of course not. He knew the facts of life, even those that hadn’t concerned him. But he wasn’t a young man, anymore, and surely not a handsome one in this state, and he didn’t understand why... 

Whether or not he understood, better him than Andromache. Better him than Polyxena. He gripped his bare knees to put his hands out of the way, to keep them from doing something foolish. He leaned forward and took Achilles’ cock in his mouth. 

***

Another instant, another hour, another eternity... 

It was warm and he didn’t know why this surprised him. Had he expected such a man to feel as chill and metal there as the armor above? He didn’t know what to do with it. His tongue could barely move. Any twitch of his jaw seemed on the verge of bringing it against his teeth and what Achilles would do with even a shadowof a bite... 

... but he _should_ bite, a realbite, enough to rend flesh. Shameful enough that he’d put himself in this position but now that he was here he ought to redeem himself in what little way he could. Achilles could never again force anyone, woman or man, without the parts to do it... 

... and that was as good as sealing the death warrants for the people behind him. The sole consolation, depending on how swiftly and thoughtlessly Achilles lashed out in return, was that he might not have to see it. 

***

It surprised him, afterward, how quickly it ended. He’d barely noticed the slow signs of arousal, how it seemed to stopper his mouth even more thoroughly than before, and then Achilles took him by the hair again and yanked his head away. Another yank, upward, and he stumbled to his feet, scrambling to keep balance between his bad leg and his worse leg, threatening to trip on discarded pieces of armor, throwing out his hands into empty air, nearly even clutching at Achilles for support. Achilles laid a hand on his shoulder, then, and wrenched it as he wrenched his hair, forcing him to turn around – was that it, was this the end, but why would Achilles sink a blade into his back when his front lay just as open? No blade came, only the inexorable press bearing him back down onto his knees. Thus shifted, Achilles’ grip moved to his arms, drawing them behind him, bringing his hands together. 

“I’d fuck you on your marriage bed,” Achilles said, “until you bled like a maiden, if only we had the time.” He spoke from just behind Hector’s ear – he, too, must have crouched on the floor – but it was by no means a whisper. It was closer to a proclamation, in case anyone in the room hadn’t understood what just took place. 

Though Astyanax – Astyanax wouldn’t understand, either way. He was too young to know such words, too young to know how they fit together. At least there was that. 

Hector kept his head lowered, his eyes on the floor. To show no resistance – that was what he tried to tell himself. Coils of rope closed on his wrists and forearms, fastening them behind his back, drawing tight – tight enough to wrench his shoulders, but no sound passed his clenched teeth. He heard Achilles get up and walk away, speaking to the men in the outer room. He strained to pay attention, even as he wished himself deaf – as though, if he didn’t know what was to come, it simply wouldn’t happen. 

In this room nobody spoke, but soft footsteps hurried forward. Andromache’s slippers paused before him, then came around to his side. She helped him stand, then stagger away from their voices to the bed. They sat together on its edge, her arm around him. She shook a handkerchief from the long sleeve of her dress and gently daubed at the lower part of his face, damp with spittle. It should have felt like another indignity, being cleaned like a dribbling old man. Instead it felt like the small comfort she meant it to be. He leaned against her to take a little more, though he still didn’t dare look her in the face. 

Meanwhile, the Myrmidons – for that was who they were – darted around them, taking apart the room with practiced ease. They exclaimed over the pieces of armor, reminding each other that Achilles would want it all, and joked about how their wives would look in Andromache’s clothes and jewels. Eventually one came to them and told them to get up, out of the way; even the bed-linens would go to Achaea. 

Andromache went picking through the things scattered across the floor. Hector seated himself against a wall, his legs extended, and watched Andromache kick off the slippers, pull on a sturdy pair of sandals, and lace another sturdy pair onto his feet. Then a cloak fastened at his throat, its wide hood pulled up over his head and halfway down his face. It was made for storms, and would put paid to any night chill. 

“That’s good thinking,” said one of the Myrmidons. 

“Is it?” said Andromache with a courtly calm. “Thank you.” 

“Not many of your men about tonight. No point in arguments.” 

***

Polydamas died on the threshold of Hector’s house. The blood smeared there said as much. He’d died on the threshold but his body lay inside, kicked out of the way, one arm flung outward. He wore no armor – whether it was taken from him or he’d rushed here without any. The sight of him drove Hector halfway to his knees; the sight of other men lying outside, and the weight of years’ worth of men before them, drove him the rest of the way. His voice returned enough to keen in his throat like an injured dog. This was where they parted – where the knot came apart, the knot tied between a pair of threads when a queen happened to speak to a fisherwoman, their newborn sons in their arms. Careful, cautious Polydamas. They should have listened to him. He should have listened to him. 

They pulled him up and thrust him at Andromache – impatient to hand off Achilles’ prizes and go back for more of their own. Polydamas and the rest were left to rot, or burn. Such were the honors for the last men of Troy. 

Polyxena walked before him, her head raised high. Andromache stayed at his side, one arm supporting him, the other holding Astyanax at her hip. The rest walked around them, in their wake, some compelled to carry the gathered spoils. They passed through the open gates of the palace and took the well-worn, flame-lit path to the Skaian Gate, treading on garlands of spring flowers.


	2. "Say it, all of you: 'Priam was lucky'"

Past the gaping gate they were separated out, the four of them shoved into chariots while the ordinary captives were gathered in readiness to be herded across the river plain. Hector’s legs were aflame from exertion by the time they pushed him in, but he had the strength to shuffle forward on his knees, then to turn himself to sit up against the front guard of the chariot, all the while trapping any sound behind his teeth. They piled in plunder after him, over his legs – tapestries and linens, mostly. Small mercies.

As they pulled out the charioteer made some comments, shouted over the wind and the whinnying horses, along the lines of the irony that he, _the_ horse-tamer in a city full of horse-tamers, had been reduced to this. He pretended that the wind and the horses had deafened him and kept his eyes on the other two chariots following close behind, on the light of Troy burning across the opening distance.

On the other side of the plain, the charioteer busied himself unloading, leaving him struggling to push himself back to his feet until Polyxena rushed over and helped him up. The Achaean camp lying abandoned just that morning was already being reassembled, slaves building frenetically by torchlight while their masters destroyed with just as much fervor scant miles away. The chariot-drivers called some over with a yell and they came carrying cloth and poles across their shoulders. In due course the poles were driven into the ground, the cloth fastened over them – brushing the ground on three sides, open on the fourth. Hector was the first one ushered into the crude tent that resulted, ducking beneath the flapping cloth and sitting heavily on the ground. Two boys came in after him, one holding a torch and the other with more rope coiled in his hands. That one approached warily, circled around to face him. “Your legs,” he said eventually, looking as though he expected Hector to somehow lash out and... break his neck with a kick, or some such thing. He thought he could have, once, in another body. But in this body he unfolded his legs before him for the boy to lash his ankles together, leaving a hobbling length between them, and tie the end of the rope around one of the poles. The boys left. Seconds later he heard Polyxena and Andromache come in.

Andromache sat down behind him. She set Astyanax at their side, lifted the cloak out of the way, and began to rub life into his numbed fingers, unpick the rope around his arms. “Thank you,” he said when the ropes loosened, and started at the sound of his own voice, diminished as it was. Her hands came up to rest on his tensed shoulders. He looked over one shoulder at her, but couldn’t make out her expression in the dark at the back of the tent. It might be that only this gave him the courage to look.

“Does it...?”

He nodded. She began to press the strain from his shoulders and arms. He was grateful she didn’t need to ask the entire question.

***

Despite everything, Astyanax slept in his wrapping of blanket (he remembered his mother saying with a laugh, _everything wakes a child, or nothing does_ ). When he picked him up and put their faces together he could feel the soft, steady breaths featherlike against his cheek. _Gods, if I ever once pleased you..._

Something jutted beneath the blanket, too solid and angular to be flesh. When he felt between the folds he knew it by touch. A little wooden chariot with turning wheels, kitted out with horses and charioteer. He fished it out and set it aside.

Time passed. He heard shouts, wails. Andromache patted Astyanax’s curling cap of hair and got up to join Polyxena, keeping watch at the open mouth of the tent. The sounds neared. Eventually someone cried out, “Oh, Princess!” Silhouettes in the new torchlight as Andromache and Polyxena received the first group of captives. Their conversation proceeded in low tones however loud the calls and laments.

He tested the length of the rope tether. It was too short to allow him out of the tent. That might be a problem when he needed to piss. But coward that he was, he was glad of it, because it meant he didn’t have to face them. It was bad enough that he had survived all his failures when better men had not. How would they scorn him now that he had contrived to live through _this_?

He hadn’t _meant_ to live. He’d thought Achilles would kill him. That – that he would do _that_ had never once occurred to him. It occurred to him now that maybe that was why Achilles did it.

Achilles might still kill him, once there was time. Might use him at his leisure and then break his neck, as he had done to Troilus.

When he breathed deeply he could still smell the apple blossoms Syntyche scattered in the water for Astyanax’s bath. When he closed his eyes he could remember their smiles as an inquisitive Astyanax stuffed a handful of petals into his mouth. Syntyche, Callistus and Melitta... Agathe, one of Andromache’s girls, who’d rushed out in search of her sisters... old Khepa, the housekeeper, who was spending the night with her family... Were they out there now? Still being marched across the plain? Or was something worse befalling them, between here and there?

_Gods, please..._

***

He jolted from a trance when Polyxena screamed, sounding as young as she really was. “Mother! _Mother_!”

Women’s voices – their mother’s voice – called back. Louder, closer, louder, closer. Astyanax decided to wake at this clamor, fussing and squirming. Shapes burst into the tent. Reflex pulled Astyanax closer, tightly enough to turn the impending howl into a startled chirrup. His mother fell upon them like a lioness over her lost cubs.

After a while, he was sure of the two women who had come in with her. Tryphaena, who was the mother of Cebriones. Princess Laothoe, who was the mother of Lycaon and Polydorus. Others crowded the entrance, blocking out the light. “Move aside,” snapped Laothoe, with royal authority. “Let the queen see her son!” They moved. His mother was weeping, but with tears of relief. She gathered him to her with gentle motions as though she were comforting a child after a nightmare, even if she’d had that nightmare herself.

After a while he rasped, “So, all the rest... they’ve...?”

“They tell us they killed Deiphobus,” she said after a last press of her lips over his brow. “We saw the other boys ourselves.”

They wouldn’t have lied to her about Deiphobus. Deiphobus had married Helen, who was held at the center of all of this; there was no way the Achaeans would allow him to live. He wondered what they had done to Helen. “And Father –”

“Oh, you should have seen him! He’d put on his old armor, can you imagine, though it hung off him, and came in waving a sword...” As though it were one of the old stories of their youth. Even as he noted this, the parchment facade collapsed. She put her hands to her face and he knew how the story ended.

“They hadn’t found Princess Laodice,” said Tryphaena. Her voice was calm, warm, as much for his mother’s benefit as his. She was good at calming and consoling, anything from bad dreams to scraped knees to untimely deaths. Of their many nursemaids she’d been a perennial favorite and Hector knew why Father had gone to her, all those years ago, after Paris was left on the mountain. “Nor Princess Creusa and her family. They searched the palace top to bottom before they sent us here.”

His sister Creusa’s family was her son, her husband, and her father-in-law. Her husband was their cousin Aeneas, and Hector would have assumed him dead as well, but all four of them together made a slender hope, substantial enough to touch.

“And we mustn’t forget Princess Ilione.”

Ilione was next-eldest to him, the eldest of the girls, the only one who had married out of Troy – to a prince of Thrace, now a king – and not returned. And when he thought of Ilione, he thought of Polydorus. Polydorus was the very youngest, born scant months after Polyxena. For their first few years they were as inseparable as twins. They along with Troilus comprised the babies of the family. And as it made no difference to his father whether Troilus was the son of Apollo, his mother treasured Polydorus as though he’d been born of her and not Laothoe. It had been a hard decision to send him across the Hellespont to Thrace, to be fostered by Ilione and her husband. Now it seemed it had been the right one.

Nobody spoke Polydorus’s name, as though it would break a spell. But his mother saw those hopes, too; she lowered her hands and held them out for Astyanax, who Hector gave her. “Yes, of course. Ilione. Thank you, Tryphaena.”

Tryphaena took in a shuddering breath. If her shadow hadn’t turned away – revealing in the act of concealing – Hector wouldn’t have realized she had begun to cry. He’d never seen her cry before. But then he’d never listened very hard for it.

Cebriones vaulting into his chariot, into the empty place left by Archeptolemus – the way Archeptolemus, what seemed like moments before, had vaulted into the empty place left by Eniopeus. Cebriones urging the horses onward toward the towering figure of Ajax. Cebriones reeling, plunging to the ground (and a laugh, _like a diver, better off in the sea gathering oysters_ ). Cebriones’ broken, eyeless face looking up at him as he buried his hands in the bloodied hair, trying for a better grip on the skull. Cebriones’ body pulled taut, yet limbs flopping, like a doll between squabbling children. Cebriones slipping out of his hands, being borne away, hands in the crowd already tearing at his armor. No hope at all, for Cebriones.

“Oh,” said Laothoe. “Oh, my dear,” she said, as a princess would never have said to a servingwoman, and opened her arms.

“You mustn’t mourn your father too much,” his mother said to him, trying to be stern, to set an example. “He’s surely holding court in Elysium now. He has your brothers to keep him company. He doesn’t have to see this anymore.”

***

Their fellow prisoners entered and left the tent like the rise and ebb of the tide. To see him, to know he was there. If they scorned him they didn’t show it in front of Mother and Andromache. And in their murmurs now and again – not very many times, but he hadn’t expected a single one – he heard of other men, he heard men’s voices, though anxious Callistus was the only one he recognized. The men and boys kept apologizing. Why _they_ apologized to _him_ he couldn’t fathom.

Cassandra, like Mother, came in and stayed in. From fragments of murmurs he learned that the Achaeans had no more respect for the sanctuary of Athena than they did for the sanctuary of Apollo. Or perhaps they thought that Athena would support them as she had in everything else – but he didn’t say this. They killed her betrothed, earnest young Coroebus, as he tried to rescue her. He remembered when, lying in bed, he’d finally given his condolences about earnest young Othryoneus and she’d said she wasn’t meant to be married, not to a good man. She didn’t say that now. She didn’t say anything at all. She hummed, a little, when Astyanax came around to her.

His sisters and sisters-in-law, as he’d been told, all but Laodice and Creusa – and Helen, though no one yet had said a word about Helen. The mothers of his siblings, not close to all of them. Of those who still lived, and lived in Troy, only some had chosen to reside at the palace. The ones who kept, say, neat little houses by the walls, or rooms near the market... there was nothing special to mark them out from their neighbors and he wanted, very much, to think they’d escaped.

And girls ducked out of the shelter of their mothers’ robes, blinked at him from their mothers’ arms, stumbled up to him whispering _Uncle?_ His nieces. For what reasons only the gods knew, Priam’s sons and daughters were as unfruitful as their father was prolific, and what children they did bear and father were mostly girls. He and Andromache had Astyanax after years of trying. Creusa and Aeneas had Ascanius, somewhat easier. And Ilione had two boys, in Thrace with Polydorus. The older one was of an age with Polydorus, in fact – an ideal companion, they’d said back then, as they discussed the matter. Deipylus, that was his name.

He’d thought he couldn’t possibly sleep again that night. But eventually the visitors began to blur together into one mass extending a hundred hands, and Laothoe chased them out. The cloak with its hood served as blanket and pillow. Months in a soft bed had spoiled him and he shifted about on the ground for a long while, trying not to disturb Andromache and Astyanax lying beside him.

***

When he woke it was from a good dream, about the orchard outside the walls. The seasons held no sway, the trees blossoming and fruiting all at once. His brothers smiled at him, their faces sticky with juice, and invited him to eat. He opened his eyes with some resentment.

The first thing he noticed in the daylight was the shabby condition of the tent above his head. He imagined some Achaean loading the sturdy cloth onto his black ship a decade ago; now it was weathered, wine-stained and torn, and would do little good if it rained.

He raised his head and sat up. There was no one left in the tent but Cassandra, sitting on the other side with her knees to her chest and her bruised arms around her knees, watching him from behind a parted veil of dark hair and seeming to listen to something with tilted head. Between them sat Astyanax’s bundled blanket and a water vessel with a ladle resting in its mouth. It was a surprisingly nice vessel, glazed blue with leaping dolphins, and a surprisingly decorative ladle of wrought silver. He wondered whose house they’d come from as he dipped and drank.

Polyxena explained when she returned that the captives were being escorted in groups to draw themselves water. There was no food yet, and Astyanax cried with hunger, so Andromache and his mother had gone in search of a woman who still had her milk, who’d be willing to act as wet nurse. “There are many women now,” said Polyxena, “with milk and no babe.”

Polyxena went out again, to see their other sisters. Andromache returned, holding a sated Astyanax by the hand and carrying a chamberpot under her other arm. That was Andromache, always thinking of such things.

She’d even thought to slip Astyanax’s little chariot in the folds of his swaddling blanket. It might be taken away – as anything might be taken away – but the Achaeans weren’t seeking wooden toys as prizes and he had something familiar to roll to and fro on the ground. Even so, seeing Hector see this embarrassed her. “What,” he asked, “do you think you should have hidden a spear in there, instead?”

“Maybe a dagger,” she said.

“And cut every throat in the night? Then we shouldn’t have been so quick to burn Paris. I’m told a hydra can kill again and again, blood to blood to blood. A vial of it, a drop in each cooking pot...” He was surprised at himself, for saying so much – and shocked at the things he heard himself saying. An awful joke, if it was a joke. And if it wasn’t a joke it was an awful plan, in all ways, craven and shoddy.

It shocked Andromache as well – he could see it on her face before he looked to the ground, taking his turn to be embarrassed. Despite this, or because of it, she lowered herself to her knees and embraced him.

“Blood to blood to blood,” Cassandra murmured. “Adders in their holds and torches in their beds...”

One of Andromache’s arms came away and reached up. A hand combed through his hair, trailed along his cheekbone. “Hector, please, look at me.”

He looked at her. She kept his chin up with her fingers pressed lightly beneath it. Her own jaw was set. “You think Achilles broke you,” she said. “You’re wrong. You are still, and always, the bravest man that I have ever known.”

He didn’t know that this was true – he doubted, very much, that it was true. But he knew that she believed it. In a way that made him even more wretched, knowing that she had been taken in by his sham. But that wretched part of him was soothed even while he cringed. He put his arms around her in return and if he didn’t deserve this, he told himself, it was still what she wanted, so let her have it.

***

“I saw him kill you,” Cassandra said beside him.

Astyanax drowsed on the outspread blanket, one hand holding his chariot and the other halfway into his mouth. Andromache stood just outside, talking to two of his sisters-in-law. He turned his head. “Achilles, you mean.”

She nodded. “His spear took you in the neck. He dragged you around the city with his chariot, again and again. Mother wanted to tear him open and take his liver in her teeth. Father had to beg him to let us ransom you.”

“But that didn’t happen,” he said, gently as he could. He’d heard by now that she tried to warn them about the Achaeans’ horse, their poisoned offering to Athena (someone said “As much as she jabbers she had to be right about something someday,” and was glared to silence). “You opened the gate.”

“Yes,” said Cassandra. “It never works, it never stops it, but I had to try.” She laid a hand on Astyanax’s forehead. “It never works, but it did.”

“Was it because Helenus –” He was remembering other times, when she and Helenus had similar visions and Helenus somehow got all the attention when they came to pass. Helenus, so far as he knew, had never refused Apollo’s advances, or been in a position to refuse them. Helenus, so far as he knew, had no curse on him at all.

She laughed before he finished the question. It was so loud, so fraught, that Andromache looked back into the tent. She lowered her head, her hair falling back into a veil. Astyanax scrunched his face and batted at the air. Cassandra closed her hand over his and began to sing a song they’d both learned in the nursery. Andromache hadn’t heard it in Thebe and found it a strange thing to sing to a child – though some of her Theban lullabies, Hector pointed out when he heard them, were not much better. The subject was the lament of King Tros for his lost son. For some ineffable reason the song even left out the part where Hermes descended to inform him that his son had been carried off not by a bandit but by a god, that everything was all right after all.

For a week after Astyanax was born, Cassandra went to great lengths to avoid him. Hector remembered that though everyone else was celebrating his firstborn son, he was unreasonably upset that just this one person was not. He knew how she was and yet he’d eventually confronted her, holding up a burbling Astyanax, demanding to know what was wrong. She recoiled as if he’d shoved a handful of vipers in her face and he backed away, abashed.

When Astyanax settled back into his nap Hector asked, “What did you see for him?”

“You won’t like it.”

“When has that stopped you?”

She smiled at that, at him. He was still blinking at it when it went away and she said, “I saw one of the towers by the Skaian Gate. Scorched, but still standing. I saw them carry him up the stairs. One of them is the Achaean seer. I think his name is Calchas. I don’t like him very much. It seems whenever I see him, he’s saying someone must be killed.”

“Go on.”

“I’m not sure who carries him. Sometimes I think it’s the boy with red hair. Other times, it’s Odysseus of Ithaca. But either way, they reach the top. They take him up to the parapet.”

He shut his eyes for a moment and saw the view from the tower – _a_ tower – as a child standing on his toes, his chin on the parapet’s edge. He could see so far out, out to where the sea met the sky, and he wasn’t yet tall enough to see how far down it went, to be frightened. “And they throw him.”

“The boy with red hair does.”

“And Odysseus of Ithaca?”

“He holds him past the edge, like this, and then he lets go.”

 _That won’t happen_ , he didn’t say. _I won’t let it_ , he didn’t say. If he didn’t want an answer, he shouldn’t have asked.

It was Cassandra who said, with something like hope, “Now I could be wrong. I pray that I’m wrong.”

She stood up, clumsily, with a wince. Standing, her arms hanging at her sides, he saw the tears in her skirt, the scatter of bloodstains, the prints of filthy hands. “Cassandra,” he said, appalled. But she came to him, and sank down again beside him, and looked at him with her large and luminous eyes – his little sister. And he held onto her, offering some of the same uncomplicated comfort as when they were children, when she cried in the nursery and he could tell her with confidence _it was only a dream_.

Yet he thought she held him as much or more than he held her – harder than Andromache, pouring into him all the touch that she could. She explained when she was done, as she extricated herself. “We’ll be carved up soon. Cast to the winds. Every one of them will want their piece so they’ll break us and break us. And I should... I want to...” She spoke her next words as though they were part of a sacred rite. “Goodbye, my brother.”

She was the first he’d heard speak openly of what would surely happen. She’d had a longer time than most, to consider it. “Goodbye, my sister.”

She nodded to him and left the tent.

***

He knew that he wasn’t quite as freakish a wretch as he’d first thought, though most of the others were young men and boys of ordinary birth. They and their kin remained tense, not knowing if some irate Achaean commander might still demand a purge of the camp. It had all depended on chance – some men were taken alive and dragged off in chains even after putting up ferocious resistance, while boys of ten were run through with swords as they begged for their lives. Chance dictated whether the Achaeans who came upon them saw a future profit or a future menace – menace even in red-faced infants. Or a future _inconvenience_ – deciding children, boys or girls, were too much trouble to bother with. Crying at the wrong time or being unable to walk the distance to the shore could be a death sentence. All of his nieces survived, though, and he knew why. Trojan princes were potential threats, but Trojan princesses were a unique commodity.

He’d learned that outside there were more tents, pitched in a line, to hold the royal prisoners. This privilege would make them easier to gather when the time came to carve them up. Honorable combat, rules of engagement, invocations to the gods, exchanges of gifts and ransoms, and it all ended in this.

 _Laodice_ , he thought. _Creusa. Ilione._ _Ascanius and Polydorus._

When they heard of the Achaeans wading through the camp, all the women hurried outside, leaving him and Astyanax once more. He thought they did this so that the Achaeans wouldn’t look inside, see them there, and decide they had to die after all. Astyanax scampered after the women but came readily enough when Hector called him back, and submitted to being held and hummed at. One of the nursery songs from Thebe. Don’t cry, it ran, don’t scream, or the wolves and the lions will eat you.

“No, not those two. Achilles staked them out already.”

“What, both of them? That doesn’t seem fair.”

“One for him, one for his boy?”

 _The boy with red hair_. Achilles had red hair – a reddish blond, like the heart of a blaze –  as did a number of prominent Achaeans, but none of them could be called _boys_ at this point and if Cassandra meant any of them she would have said their names.

“I hear Agamemnon promised him first pick of _twenty_ girls, if only he’d come back and fight.”

“If only _I_ could sit out battles in a sulk and get twenty girls...”

Their voices faded. Andromache returned with another nurse she had lined up – a woman without a child, with arms as bruised as Cassandra’s, who wept into Astyanax’s hair as she gave him her breast.

***

A pair of Myrmidons came for him not long after that. “Achilles wants you,” one of them said, not unkindly.

 _Take care of him_ , he almost told Andromache. He’d been thinking over whether to tell her what Cassandra saw, and why it might be true; there was no time left now for that. And she didn’t need to be _told_ such a banal thing – she’d do it either way. So he nodded to her, hoping it was as reassuring as he tried to make it, passed her Astyanax, and got to his feet with the help of the tent pole.

They cut the rope from the pole, leaving his feet hobbled, but they didn’t bind his hands again. He almost wished they did, because it would imply he was putting up more resistance than he actually was. When he put up the hood of his cloak he thought for a moment they would make him go without it, to compound his humiliation, but they didn’t. They proceeded, one ahead and one at his side.

He kept his eyes lowered, with the excuse of watching for treacherous patches of ground. The man ahead of him was constantly stopping himself, waiting for him to catch up. Their progress through the Achaean camp was slow, and yet he avoided noticing much of anything besides feet and the cloth of tents. If they passed anyone he would have recognized, he didn’t know; if they passed anyone who recognized him, he didn’t see. But he heard when the boy said, disappointed, “Is that him?” and his head rose in spite of itself.

If he’d seen the boy without hearing his voice, he would have guessed at fifteen or sixteen. But he _had_ heard his voice, as yet unbroken, so he guessed lower. He sat by the entry to a richer tent, running a short sword across a whetstone. Still dressed for battle, in armor well-fitted to his coltish frame. He’d set his helmet aside on the ground, and his hair was the color of a flame – a flame’s darker edges, limned against the night.

“Well, he’s not at his best,” said the Myrmidon who had spoken to Hector, before. “Your father might not have finished him _entirely_ , but he left his mark all right. He there, Pyrrhus?”

“Off watching the lottery,” said Pyrrhus, who was still looking at Hector as though he suspected an impostor. “I don’t see why. He’s made his pick.”

The other Myrmidon said, “I suppose you’re not old enough to appreciate that sort of fun.”

Pyrrhus scowled, laying aside the sword. “Well, leave him here, then, and you go have your _fun_.”

They left him there. As they walked away, Pyrrhus got up. Almost on his toes, peering for Hector’s face under the hood, his hands undid the fastening and yanked the cloak from his shoulders to pool about his feet in the sand. He looked him over again, from his disheveled hair to the crazing of scars on his shins, and remained unimpressed. Hector could not fault him for that.

 _The boy with red hair._ Who knew how many redheaded boys there were in the train of the Achaeans? But he was the first he’d seen in such proximity.

The boy here and now extended an arm into the tent. “Make yourself comfortable.”

***

As he stepped inside, he felt the change beneath his feet to a floor of cloth. He glanced about his surroundings. Achilles, true enough, was not there. Neither was anyone else. Some part of him was annoyed – _annoyed_! – to be summoned here and left waiting. He was no longer someone whose time was important, someone who held audience or appointment. From now on he was at the convenience of others.

He took a seat in an inlaid tamarisk chair, opened his fists, and unlaced his sandals, slipping the loose straps beneath the rope on his ankles, before he could track dust and sand over the carpets. They were finely-worked in brilliant colors and he ran through the names of cities known for their weavers, cities already put to the torch. Though it didn’t have to be one of those. If they had been sold by a trader, given out to a guest, the possibilities there were beyond counting. The tent, as large and rich as it was, bore the signs of hasty assembly, most of its furnishings placed as if for the sake of placing them, with no apparent pattern. Recent spoils lay heaped. The basic gold and silver, coins and ingots. Linens, wools, cottons, silks. A blood-red tapestry had been rolled with the finished side facing outward so that he saw the moribund figures and knew they were of Helen’s making. An open jewelry box, its latch smashed – and atop the tangle lay Creusa’s favorite necklace of amber and pearls. Those were only a few of the things he knew from the palace, and among those things a large portion he knew from his own house.

A basket with two loaves of bread sat on a carved and enameled cedar table, alongside a pitcher of wine. He was sure Pyrrhus had been sarcastic, so he touched none of it after he rose from the chair. He’d had more than enough fresh water but he hadn’t eaten since  the previous evening. He tried not to think about the meal, heavy and rich with the contents of flung-open storehouses, soaked in sweet wine – no need to scrimp and portion, now that the war was over.

Cloth hangings marked off an alcove at the back of the tent. He expected it to hold the layers of fabric and fleece that made up a camp bed, and any other things to be done out of sight of visitors. When he moved around to its open side, he saw that he was right – and he saw that Achilles had made a recent addition to its layers. He’d spent months becoming acquainted with all the bedding he owned. Andromache had it changed often, for variety. And beyond that the blue bedspread laid out the previous night, the one laid out before him now, happened to be one Andromache wove in the giddy early days of their marriage. He remembered coming up behind her as she stood at the loom and dropping his chin onto her shoulder to watch the pattern take shape. He remembered the words that were not whispered – Achilles had been too busy sacking his home to desecrate his marriage bed, so he’d devised a substitute.

A scream broke out over the muted clamor of the camp. He couldn’t distinguish the words, but he heard enough to know there _were_ words.

His legs folded again onto the finely-worked carpet. At first he tried to rub the sting from his eyes. Then as the weight descended on him again, the weight of everything he’d allowed to fall, he gave up and simply pressed his hands to his face as he concentrated on drawing breaths, on holding them steady and silent while tears seeped between his fingers.

If there was a good thing about that weight it was that it was _so_ heavy, so all-encompassing, that it wasn’t possible to feel all of it for very long before it overwhelmed the senses. When it passed back into numbness he shook himself like a dog and dried his hands on the hem of his tunic as he took another look around the tent. No one else had come in yet. He took the time to compose himself, to further dry his face, even to pull tangles from his hair. He assembled a mask of dignity, and slipped it on. He might not be a brave man, but he would do his best to act as though he was.

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter title credits:  
> 1 and 2: _The Trojan Women_ , by Seneca the Younger (translated by Emily Wilson)


End file.
